Movie season is here.

As if to make up for the schlock floating around the previous 11 months of the year, December has been packed with smart and delicious movies. Several, which I heartily recommend, are based on books or stories (namely, Pride & Prejudice, Memoirs of a Geisha, and Brokeback Mountain.)

What can I say about Brokeback Mountain that hasn't been said? Yes, it is worth all the buzz it is receiving. The movie has had one of the highest ticket-sales-to-seats ratios ever encountered, and it's finally making its way into more theaters across the country. In week two of its release it was shown on only 69 screens nationwide but was the 8th top grosser at the boxoffice. This past weekend was its fifth week, shown on 483 screens, and was able to again break the top 10 at number 8. Compare this to Chronicles of Narnia, which is being shown on 3500+ screens!

When I saw it in DC on weekend #2 we had to buy tickets for the next day (which also sold out). Okay, so we saw it in Dupont Circle, the fruit loop of DC. It was fun to see it in a packed theater, and the audience was 90% male. But I'm tired of hearing it labeled as a 'gay cowboy' movie (which is how i referred to it in the beginning.) Sure it features the supposedly-shocking details of a (hot, cowboy) man-on-man love story. But hopefully people can recognize the characters' universal life struggles: love, following your dreams, the brevity of life, and the oh-so-common-though-we-don't-talk-about-it resignation to less-than-ideal marriages. Besides the two hot cowboys, the actresses play stellar, heartfelt roles.

So go see it! There are so many things to appreciate: the masterful directing, the acting, the scenery. I'm looking forward to watching it again (soon) now that I used up my buzz-induced critic's eye on the first viewing. Since it is opening outside of the largest metropolitan areas (finally), the movie's real test with the American public will begin.

The picture above is from the story collection in which Brokeback Mountain appeared (after it was published in The New Yorker, if you can imagine that. Cowboys on the sidewalks of Manhattan? And not the one wearing tighty-whities?). Her writing is amazingly visual and engrossing. I can see and smell the roughnecked Wyomans she follows. And I feel the abandonment she describes on those dark, desolate, and impossibly long Wyoming plains. "Nothing but blackness and your headlights cutting a little wedge into it, could be the middle of the ocean for all you can see." Or, "Nothing much but weather and distance, the distance punctuated once in a while by ranch gates, and to the north the endless murmur and sun-flash of semis rolling along the interstate." A must-read, I think, for anyone with a connection to that hardened country.